Puig and Mazón seek melee in the first electoral debate: "Sanchismo" or "Gürtel"
That Valencian politics has run at a frantic pace in these years is something that has become clear in the first electoral debate with which the campaign in the Valencian Community starts. Organized by Cadena SER in Valencia, this Friday brought together the six candidates for the Generalitat, of which only one repeats compared to 2019: the current head of the Consell, the socialist Ximo Puig. With all the national focus on Valencia and 28-M turned into a dog-faced first round of elections between PSOE and PP, the debate has synthesized the clash between the blocks of the left and the right, but Puig and his main rival, the popular Carlos Mazón, to look for the melee after a week full of tension.
The Valencian political crusher has also placed Mamen Peris (Ciudadanos), Joan Baldoví (Compromís), Carlos Flores (Vox) and Héctor Illueca (Unidas Podemos-Esquerra Unida) on stage.. But the debate, moderated by Bernardo Guzmán, has ended up defining the fight between Puig and Mazón to break the technical tie between blocks with which the campaign begins, that is, to tip the balance on the side of “Volkswagen” and the “future”, according to the PSOE, or on the side of “change” and the “end of sanchismo”, according to the PP.
Héctor Illueca, Carlos Flores, Joan Baldoví, Mamen Peris, Carlos Mazón and Ximo Puig, in the SER debate. EFE
Puig and Mazón came to the debate after days of mixed accusations: if the PP has targeted Puig's payments to his brother Francis Puig when he was mayor of Morella, the PSOE has responded by questioning the “dirty game” of the popular. In what was in practice their first face-to-face meeting, both leaders did not shy away from direct confrontation.
“We have to choose between Gürtel or Volkswagen, between looking forward or looking back,” summed up Puig, who began by looking back to the past to question the management of the PP governments: “The Valencian Community was the image of mud and corruption and today it is stability and social peace”.
Mazón, who has played over and over again with the idea that the vote to punish Puig will be a vote to punish Sánchez, has also made it clear that 28-M is about deciding between two models: “You have to choose between the change or the sanchismo that is crushing us”. In this sense, it has started by defining the socialist baron as a “delegate of sanchismo” in the Valencian Community, precisely to expose a Puig who has lost the water or financing war against the Government of Pedro Sánchez. Mazón's final assault has been to go straight for the jugular: “Five million Valencians suffer from inflation except Puig's brother”.
“You calm down”, Puig has come to snap at Mazón when he interrupted him. “It is that he campaigns in 2023 messing with the PP of 2010. You are the president,” Mazón complained..
In fact, the debate has derived at times in an “everyone against Mazón”. “I don't know what country you live in”, Baldoví has released to the PP candidate, whom he has reproached for the cuts he made in his day in education or health: “The PP took the money out of the pocket of the Valencians and took it to accounts in Switzerland”.
“Mazón already had a public position in the time of Zaplana”, ironized Illueca, who also reproached him for the “fiscal race” in which he has embarked with promises of all kinds of tax cuts when “Ayuso has turned Madrid into a tax haven”.
“What is your proposal for political regeneration?” Peris asked, to remind Mazón that in Orihuela he presents a candidate to whom the Prosecutor's Office asks for seven years in prison and that the popular “have not had corruption when Ciudadanos has thrown them out of the institutions”.
Even the Vox candidate has sent his own message to the leader of the PP. “Mr. Mazón”, Flores began, “the panorama that you paint of the Government of the Botànic is terrifying, so I do not understand how you later wanted to agree with him”.
And it is that while the PP seeks to spread the message that it aspires to govern alone and without having to depend on Vox -even exploring parliamentary dialogue with the left-, Flores has been blunt: “Not even in his wettest dreams” will he achieve Mazón the absolute majority. “Vox has no ceiling because, far from settling for being the second party of the right, we want to be the first of the Valencians,” Flores has warned.
And if Illueca has made a nod to the “unified right”, Flores has responded with the “fought left”. The thing was, in short, also of blocks. In an attempt to mobilize left-wing voters, Baldoví summed it up as follows: “There will be two possibilities: a new plural government of the Botànic, or a plural government of the right. There is no more”. Of course, the one who has avoided being placed in one or the other side has been Peris. “I am of the center,” he has had to clarify.